China Photos/Getty Images

If a disaster the magnitude of the quake that hit China's Sichuan province last month had taken place in the United States, (think 50 Hurricane Katrinas) you can bet that the nation would still be reeling, many public services would not yet have resumed, and certainly some schools would still be closed. But nearly a month after the devastating earthquake hit, millions of Chinese students, many of whom have lost homes or loved ones, are returning to normalcy as they sit for the most important exam of their lives.

Today and tomorrow, an estimated 11 million secondary school students will vie for 6 million Chinese university spots: tough odds that put students and their families on edge. Slate.com's Manuela Zonensein puts the exams in perspective this way:

It is China's SAT—if the SAT lasted two days, covered everything learned since kindergarten, and had the power to determine one's entire professional trajectory."

The pressure is so great that many children study up to 12 hours a day, parents and children report adverse effects on their health due to anxiety, and large numbers of family members flock to temples, praying to Buddha and Confucius for their child's success. When prayer doesn't seem to cut it, some students even have resorted to high-tech cheating schemes.

Life, of course, isn't completely back to normal yet. Students in the hardest-hit areas will have an extra month before they, too, must take the test of their lives. And as a safety precaution, bays of tents have been constructed outside testing centers in case a large aftershock should disrupt the students' uneasy calm.

China Photos/Getty Images

The Olympic torch reached Shanghai today where the relay was accompanied by a moment of silence observed by over 80,000 people for victims of the Sichuan earthquake. Among those carrying the flame were emergency services workers who had participated in the rescue effort. Shanghai's mayor Han Zheng noted the new symbolism of the relay:

"When torchbearers pass the flame, it's not just the Olympic spirit they are passing, but also the confidence and courage with which the people of Shanghai join hands with the victims of the quake to rebuild their beautiful homelands."

Last month, the torch relay was overwhelmingly viewed as a fiasco, marred by protests until organizers were actually hiding the flame from onlookers.  Now, of course, the symbolism has changed significantly. What was once a massive moving target for international protests over China's human rights crimes, is now being portrayed (Western media included) as a symbol of China's resilience in the face of catastrophe.

The international sympathy for China brought on by the earthquake may fade by the time the Olympics start, (It's not as if Tibet or Darfur have suddenly disappeared.) but I would still expect to see China invoking the tragedy quite a bit during the games. Supporting the earthquake recovery may even give "cover" to international leaders who want to attend the games but were afraid of appearing to condone China's policies.

Until two weeks ago, the mounting protests made it look like China's international coming-out party was sure to be an embarassing debacle. China's new, more sympathetic narrative may just save the Beijing games from disaster.

What are the world's disaster hotspots? Arthur Lerner-Lam, who we spoke with in last week's Seven Questions about global disasters, set out with a team from Columbia University and the World Bank to answer this in "Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis." They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world's land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is "valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses." And what's more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

The following map shows mortality risk by disaster type. This isn't a comprehensive summary but rather a summary of the top at-risk areas. Those purple blips in central China sure have a lot more meaning in the aftermath of recent events.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

This second map shows risk in terms of total economic loss based on disaster type.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

And finally, the third map normalizes potential economic loss based on country GDP. Notice the migration of the top at-risk areas away from the more developed regions.

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

Yes, parents who lost a child in the earthquake will be able to have another child under China's one-child policy. 

This is disturbing news. Chinese officials are now warning that earthquake-damaged dams in Sichuan province may be strained to the breaking point:

Two hydropower stations in Maoxian county, where 7,000 residents and tourists remain stranded near the epicenter, were "seriously damaged". Authorities warned that dams could burst. Landslides had blocked the flow of two rivers in northern Qingchuan county, forming a huge lake in a region where 1,000 have already died and 700 are buried, Xinhua said.

Luckily, the massive Three Gorges Dam appears to have been unaffected.

Invoking the United Nations' "Responsibility to Protect" clause, the EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana joined French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in calling for the international community to aid the population of Burma, even without the consent of their government.

"We have to use all the means to help those people," Javier Solana said before an emergency meeting of EU ministers in Brussels. "The United Nations charter opens some avenues if things cannot be resolved in order to get the humanitarian aid to arrive."

China's veto pretty much precludes a Security Council resolution which is why some, like journalist (and top public intellectual) Anne Applebaum are calling for a new "coalition of the willing" to deliver aid without the junta's cooperation. Applebaum acknowledges that the phrase has been "tainted forever" by its association with the war in Iraq, but she isn't the only one drawing that parrallel. The Christian Science Monitor quoted one Burmese merchant who wondered why his country didn't meet the criteria for humanitarian intervention:

"I want to talk to Mr. George Bush. What are you doing? United Nations, what are you doing? We have no food, no water. This is the worst government in the world. Same as Saddam Hussein. Why you cannot help us?"

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

It seems hard to imagine a scenario in which the massive earthquake that rocked China's western Sichuan Province at 2:28pm local time today has not killed tens of thousands -- possibly more. Beijing originally put the death toll at 61. Hours later, the figure was increased to "up to 8,500." With rescuers, including thousands of Chinese soldiers, still unable to reach the epicenter of the quake, one can only assume this figure is tragically optimistic.

Officials at the U.S. Geological Survey have said that the magnitude 7.9 quake was relatively shallow. Shallow earthquakes do more damage near their epicenters than ones which occur deeper in the Earth. Just over 30 years ago, in 1976, a similarly shallow quake, measuring magnitude 7.5, hit the northern Chinese city of Tangshan. It killed more than 250,000 people.

It's worth watching Beijing's response to the crisis, for a couple of reasons (in addition to any worst-case Olympic scenarios).The first will be to see how real recent transformations in Beijing's disaster response policies are, including a new network of emergency management offices and provisions which give local leaders more autonomy in times of crisis. So far, the speed with which Beijing has responded has been impressive. Can it be sustained and intensified?

The second will be to gauge Beijing's commitment to transparency with regard to the scale and scope of the quake's impact. So far, information seems to have flowed relatively freely to the Western media. As the scale of the disaster increases, and with it the death toll, in all likelihood revealing deficiencies in engineering and infrastructure, it will be interesting to see if these channels of communication remain as open.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Nearly a week after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma, the first UN World Food Program and Red Cross planes were finally allowed to land in Yangon today. U.S. military planes carrying supplies are still waiting in Bangkok for permission to fly from the Burmese government.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis continues to worsen. The total number of casualties is anywhere between 23,000 and 100,000 depending on estimates and over 1 million people may have lost their homes. As the arresting images in FP's photo essay "Burma Picks up the Pieces" show, rebuilding after this catastrophe would be a monumental task for any state. For one as repressive and paranoid as Burma, it may be impossible.

While it might seem unimaginable to find a reason for optimism in suffering of this scale, the Burmese people can only hope that the cyclone, and the government's inept handling of it, might be the final blow that brings this odious regime to an end.

KHIN MAUNG WIN/AFP/Getty Images

The devastating cyclone that hit Burma this weekend, killing perhaps 22,500 people -- 40,000 more are still missing -- seems to have spared the country's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw. Deep in the heart of the country's interior and surrounded by mountainous jungle, the isolated new capital, only unveiled last year, suits the insular military junta just fine. But The Irrawaddy reports that civil servants and military officials, many of whom left family behind in Rangoon, are bucking orders from the junta to stay put. Instead, they've fled to look for lost family members in the cyclone's path:

We left our children in Rangoon, and we should be there with them now," the official said, adding that higher authorities have turned down all requests for leave until after the May 10 referendum.

Many of Burma's bureaucrats have homes in Rangoon, where they lived until the junta suddenly shifted the capital to Naypyidaw in November 2005. Telephone lines and Internet connections in Rangoon, which is still the country’s main commercial center, have been down since Friday.

Military personnel with relatives in the stricken area have also been returning to their homes without permission from their commanding officers.

Perhaps another sign that bungling relief efforts could weaken the junta's control?

In one of the biggest annual movements of humanity, about 200 million Chinese make roughly 2.2 billion trips over the Lunar New Year holiday. This year, Jack Frost made a guest appearance, causing massive travel delays, damaging key infrastructure, and disrupting coal shipments to power plants. 

How does China's winter disaster stack up against Hurricane Katrina? Here's a look: 

Fatalities	60	1,353
Damage	$7.5 billion	$96 billion
Evacuees	1.7 million	1.1 million
Homes damaged or destroyed	Over 1 million	300,000
Official visits	PM Wen Jiabao to Guangzhou	Bush to New Orleans
Industries affected	coal	oil & gas
Power supply	17 of 31 provinces in brownouts	2.5 million without power
Troops Deployed	500,000 soldiers, 1.6 million paramilitary	50,000 National Guard Troops

Photos: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images; ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

As mentioned in this morning's Brief, the town of Tuusula, Finland was the tragic site of school shootings Wednesday when an 18-year-old gunman shot and killed seven classmates and the principal of his school. Having been an exchange student in Finland many moons ago, I can imagine this coming as a huge shock to the Finns, whose violent crime rates are exceedingly low. 

That said, Finland does have a robust gun culture. Any adult can own a handgun as long as it's registered with a shooting club. And just from my experience there, the gun culture is largely centered around hunting (reindeer meat*, anyone?) and target shooting. I personally knew more people who owned guns over there than I do in the United States, which makes me think that gun ownership is more concentrated here. Anyhow, Finland ranks third in the world in gun ownership, with 56 firearms per 100 people, compared to a whopping 90 in the United States and 61 in Yemen, which ranks second. That's according to this fantastic graphic by the Washington Post, which was tucked away on page A14 in today's paper:

Other surprises from this chart? Iraq has "only" 39 firearms per 100 people.

*UPDATE: Finnish reader Timo Riitamaa writes in—

People don't shoot reindeer, they shoot moose. Moose are wild animals.
Reindeers, while living freely in herds, are earmarked by their owners and killed by a butcher.

Dick Cheney is tired. Watch this video clip of him catching a little shut-eye during yesterday's Cabinet meeting at the White House, where the main item on the agenda was the California wildfires. Maybe he would care if it were a red state.

ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images

How's the surge going? The latest figures from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees tell us that an average of 60,000 Iraqis a month are fleeing their homes in fear of their lives, an increase of 10,000 since the buildup of U.S. troops began in January. And who could blame them? We've already highlighted the recent BBC/ABC/NHK poll here on Passport, which revealed that as many as 70 percent of Iraqis feel less secure since the surge started.

What's worse, escaping the violence has just gotten a lot harder. Until this Monday, neighboring Syria had allowed in any Iraqi without a visa for a six month period. Now, new visa regulations imposed by the Syrian government have made it so that every Iraqi—with the exception of academics and businessmen (and perhaps the odd insurgent)—must apply for a visa at the embassy in Baghdad's al-Mansour district, an area prone to sectarian violence. The result? According to a UNHCR spokesman:

For the first time in months, if not years, UNHCR field workers visiting the Syrian-Iraq border yesterday found the crossing point virtually empty.

We shouldn't be quick to point fingers at Syria. The estimated 1.4 million Iraqi refugees living there have cost the Syrian government some $1 billion a year and have put undue strain on the country's health, education, and housing services. An on-the-ground Brookings report revealed that in 2006, the state had to foot the bill for a 35 percent increase in subsidized bread as well as 30,000 new Iraqi students flooding the school systems. Syrian citizens blame the refugees for the recent spike in unemployment, cost of basic goods, and high rents in Damascus neighborhoods (in some places, rental prices have doubled or even tripled since the outbreak of the war). But despite UNHCR's calls for international assistance, Syria has mostly been left to deal with the situation alone. U.N. officials have desperately been advocating the inclusion of a "humanitarian visa"—which would ensure that those fleeing persecution won't be turned away because they don't meet regular visa requirements—but it's about time someone else lent a helping hand.

MORRIS BERNARD/AFP/Getty Images

At least the refugees now have Angelina Jolie on their side. The actress visited refugees on the Iraq-Syria border at the end of August and demanded increased international support:

It is absolutely essential that the ongoing debate about Iraq's future includes plans for addressing the enormous humanitarian consequences these people face.

Maybe she can get someone to pay attention.

MARIO TAMA/Getty Images News     

   Photo: The French Quarter on August 29, 2005

Many people are probably wondering today why, two years after Katrina, New Orleans remains something a little less than a shining city on a hill. The news on the Big Easy's recovery is not all bad, but it's certainly disappointing for those of us who were hoping the city would bounce back quickly from tragedy. Only the old parts of New Orleans, which were built on the higher ground and were never destroyed, seem to be thriving—and many people have fled for the suburbs. In a fascinating New York Times Sunday Magazine article about the wild world of catastrophic insurance, Michael Lewis goes a long way toward explaining what is going wrong:

Louisiana cannot generate and preserve wealth without insurance, and it cannot obtain insurance except at the market price. But that price remains a mystery. Billions of dollars in insurance settlements — received by local businesses and homeowners as payouts on their pre-Katrina policies — bloat New Orleans banks and brokerage houses. The money isn't moving because the people are paralyzed. It's as if they have been forced to shoot craps without knowing the odds. Businesses are finding it harder than ever to buy insurance, and homeowners are getting letters from Allstate, State Farm and the others telling them that their long relationship must now come to an end. "I've been in the business 45 years," says a New Orleans insurance broker named Happy Crusel, "and I've never seen anything remotely like this." An entire city is now being reshaped by an invisible force: the price of catastrophic risk. But it's the wrong price.

Lewis's article is basically a long profile of John Seo, a math whiz who has pioneered "esoteric financial options"—complex financial products that other people couldn't figure out how to price properly. Seo's insights on how to spread the risk from catastrophic events such as Katrina are hugely important in an age of worsening storms. But they could have unexpected pernicious consequences.

Consider the undiminished risk of flooding in New Orleans, wildfires in Malibu, or hurricanes along the Florida coast. I know; everybody wants to be near water. But the truth is, people shouldn't be building their homes in flood plains, in areas that are especially prone to severe wildfires and mudslides, or on ecologically fragile barrier islands—and insurers shouldn't be encouraged to sell policies to people building new homes in such places. (I'm not calling for, say, the wholesale evacuation of Singapore.) It is politically costly for politicians to resist massive bailouts after events like Hurricane Andrew; just look at what happened to Bush I in the 1992 election. Knowing this reality, insurance companies might take risks that they otherwise wouldn't. We need to ensure that Seo's innovations, for all the good they might do, don't magnify this problem.